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Sunday, July 8

The Anti-Food Dilemma

We're pretty much culturally indoctrinated to think that all weight problems relate to too-much-food intake. That the real exercise needed for weight-loss is "push-aways". So it seems like a no-brainer that if you want to be thinner, you eat less.

This concept is so ingrained in most of us that even when we KNOW, intellectually, that we need to eat calories 'near' our basal metabolic rate in order to prevent our metabolism slowing down, it is often difficult to do.

Even though we may KNOW that for our body (this is my case) we need to eat regularly throughout the day, the more often the better, still, STILL!!, it is difficult to do it. At least for me. I'm working on that.

So, from late May to earliest June, I actually ate food. Not perfectly, no, forgot my supplements, should have had more water, failed the eat-every-3-hours test, but in general, every day I ate around 3 times. I was just restarting lowcarb eating. My calories should have been higher but they weren't terribly low.

I recovered from my months of high carb eating, and lost 24 lbs the first week, which is merely water/glycol of course, not fat. When I dropped the carbs, my body dropped the water it holds to process them.

From early June to the end of June, my eating sucked. There were a few days that I ate a few times and made it to nearly 2000 calories, but by few I mean... maybe three days out of that month. Most the time, I forgot to eat... I might get a couple slimfasts down a day... I just wasn't getting nearly enough calories. The new ketosis had killed my appetite, plus I'm lazy for cooking, and I have some issue with not-eating as a control thing I think (working on it!), so suffice to say, my calories were way too low and my eating frequency was too.

On June 5 I weighed 379. But in the whole of June, I varied from around there to 390, all over the map of that range, back and forth, as if my body couldn't decide what to do, and refused to go much under that. Usually when my eating fails like that, I don't vary so much, I just don't lose anything at all. Period. By the end of June, my weight was 378. Four weeks, 1 pound. For someone who allegedly has a BMR of nearly 4000 calories a day, and was only eating <1000 for nearly a month, that is not quite simple math.

Late on July 1 I decided to get with the program and really start eating more regularly. It still was imperfect, my calories still low, but I made more of an effort to eat more often and/or to eat more food each day. The next day I began that time of month, so my weight went up 10 lbs which is normal for that. I kept on working on eating more regularly. Even if that meant having a couple tablespoons of peanut butter, I tried to eat SOMETHING every few hours.

As of today, five days later after I began eating halfway decently again, my weight 'whooshed' from 388 (well, 378 if you remove the TOM water gain) to 370 -- finally for the first time breaking that seeming roadblock range. The only difference is that I finally started eating more calories, and more often.

I have seen this repeatedly over my several cycles of lowcarbing. If I don't eat enough, I don't lose weight, even though my BMR is allegedly over 4000 calories (hahahaha). When I make a POINT to eat many times through the day, and at least a couple thousand calories, the weight begins coming off.

Since this contradicts the idea that if we just eat fewer and fewer calories we'll get skinnier in no time, I thought I'd make a point to post about it.

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Click on the pic for Pink's Video. It's a spoof of modern females in the media and the body obsession.

What do you guys think about the blog in blue and green? I'll probably change it back eventually to the red/white/orange/yellow it used to be.

370 is a new record for me. The last month, with my weight seeming to go up more often than down, and me having the worst reaction of not-eating partly in response to that, I was getting SO demoralized about it all.

Congrats on seeing progress PJ! I've seen several people (when I moderated a low-carb forum) who actually did better when they upped their calories and carbs a bit. (Heatlhy calories and carbs.. not the junk kind.) Keep up the great work!

At my fattest (that I know of,) 278, I was probably eating 3500-4000 calories a day. Just cutting the carbs cut my appetite back to normal size. I did need to cut back but the hunger just made me crazy.

Hey PJ!Thanks so much for visiting my blog and for leaving those comments--I gotta tell you, this is a very, very beautiful site to look at! And your words mean alot to me, too--I feel ya.Take care!Adam;-)

True, I am super-obese. That isn't going to change much. And, I did previously lose ~170# eating lowcarb/primal. But the blog shifted focus in mid-Nov 2011. The focus on fat loss is gone. Now it's just about my efforts to work out a lifestyle, for me and my teen girl, that makes us feel good.

It's still centered around food that makes me and the teenage daughter feel good instead of bad. It may have stuff outside that. It may have my occasional ramblings related to weight or those issues as that's part of my life, is all.

I have an interest in supplements and herbs, alternative medicines and sciences, my cats and my teen, controlled psi, archetype meditations, fat politics, and nutrition science, so those might wander through.

Comments are open to anyone including anonymous, and are unmoderated but for spam / troll elements. -- PJ